Life in America in Black and White

The Black Suspect

On October 16, 2014, a police officer arrived at the scene of a disturbance on a Chicago street.

By now you have probably seen the video.  That cop exited his vehicle and according to the dashcam video 6 seconds later shot the teenager who was walking down the street and away from the police. The teen fell to the ground, the cop then shot the child 15 more times.  He emptied his gun into that Black child’s body.

The other cops stood and watched and apparently only intervened when he attempted to reload.

I say ‘apparently only intervened” because there is no sound, the only sound is deadly silence.  Why was it erased? Were some of the cops hooting and hollering and egging him on? We don’t know, we will probably never know.

What we do know is that boy died on a Chicago street; he had neither hurt nor killed anyone.  He died on that street that night simply for Walking While Black.

The video and the autopsy showed the Mayor, the prosecutor and other Chicago officials knew what happened on October 17^th, 2014. A day after the murder.

That police officer remained at work and was finally arrested and charged with FIRST DEGREE MURDER on November 24^th, 2015, 15 months and one week after that murder was committed.  The arrest was made because a judge, practicing law NOT politics had given the city a deadline of November 25^th to release the video.  Reporters had sued and obtained the autopsy report and the order to release the video.

The White Terrorist

Friday, November 27^th, 2015, also known as Black Friday, some of us are fortunate to be home with our families and friends, while others go to work.

But this year, there were families mourning and others concerned about their loved ones, because on Friday the news broke that there was an active shooter outside a Planned Parenthood Clinic in Colorado Springs.

The shooter was in the clinic. He killed 3 people and injured 9.  He shot and killed a police officer and wounded 5 others.

The shooter, a mass murderer, another white American terrorist was apprehended.  He is, as I write this, alive in a jail in Colorado. He was not shot multiple times by the responding officers, even though there were officers down.

He was apprehended.

I want you to think about the above, I want you to think about the differences in the behavior.  I want you to ask yourself why is this happening.  Why has it been happening for years and is now only being exposed by the technology known as cell phones.  I want you to ask yourself why the Federal government waited until this week to decide to track shootings of civilians by the police.

And last but most importantly, I want you to think about the fact that Laquan McDonald was shot 6 seconds after Jason Van Dyke arrived at the scene.

Robert Dear engaged the police for 5 hours before he was finally arrested, alive and unharmed.

These are 2 incidents of Life in America in Black and White.

HOW MUCH LONGER?

Our country, this great country known as America has had its up and downs. After all, those of us who live and govern this place are human beings, with all of the foibles attached to humanity.

I could go back in history and make a long list of our failings, but I am not going to do so.  Instead I am going to focus on our current embarrassment.  The man who started off as a joke and has proved a reader of mine, correct when many months ago in response to a clown car article of min correct, when she wrote that she could not be amused, since she found him to be dangerous.

His 3 latest episodes are for me his most dangerous and despicable so far.

At a rally over the weekend, he was being heckled, his response was not what politicians do, which is to either ignore or engage the person or persons.

Instead he instructed whom? The crowd? His bodyguards? to “get him out of here”

The resulting fracas saw the lone heckler on the ground being manhandled and kicked by Trump’s supporters as he continued to rile up the crowd.

This behavior is from a man who wants to be our President.

His second and even more despicable act occurred when he told a crowd that he saw “thousands of people” celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center. He watched from NYC as this happened in Jersey City.  As of last night, no news outlet or person (Carson agreed and then retracted) has corroborated his absolutely disgusting lie. 

I lived through 911.  I watched TV almost 24 hours per day, starting moments after I received a chat message that ‘a plane had hit the WTC’.  My response based on the assumption that it was a 2-seater was ‘where did he buy his license’.  There is no footage of people celebrating.  It did not happen.  It occurred here only in the mind of Trump who feels he has not done enough damage to us and to our country.  He wants and needs to continue to stomp on us while we are down.

The only celebration shown at the time was in the West Bank.

As I write this column, no member of the Republican Party has said, No that is not true. Christie as governor of N.J. responded with "I do not remember that, and so it's not something that was part of my recollection. I think if it had happened, I would remember it, but, you know, there could be things I forget, too."  Governor Christie does not remember because it did not happen.

Not having created a big enough furor, he then re-tweeted a chart of murder statistics, when it was brought to his attention that the data is incorrect, he left the tweet up for his rabid followers to see, since the numbers support his narrative.

And so I ask of the leadership of the GOP and the RNC, how much longer are you going to allow this man to desecrate what is left of the party of Lincoln? Your lack of actions leading up the 2008 election, which should have been an attempt to control the Tea Party, now has your party on a death march and your decision to say no to any of President Obama’s policies and your inherent disdain for the poor is responsible for Trump’s rise.  The people, who love him, hate you.  The people who love him are the ones who lost the most when your love for Wall Street allowed the banks to bring our economy to the brink of a recession.

And now we are all paying for your bad decisions, and you are watching a fear mongering racist billionaire tear your party apart.  And none of you have the nerve to stand up and say to him, “we have had enough of you”.  In case you have forgotten, let me remind you, this is America, he cannot throw you into a dungeon and toss the key into a sewer.  He cannot confiscate your money; he cannot take away your jobs.

For today, you have only one job. That job is to take back your party, kick Donald Trump to the curb.  You created the monster, shut it down before it shuts you and our country down.

Extremists - They are all around us.

In the past few days we have seen laid bare some of the ‘isms that Americans have.

For some, it is extremism.  Donald Trump, Ben Carson, 31 governors and 242 Republican and 47 Democratic Congressmen have put it on display in reference to the Syrian refugees.

Millions of Syrians are on the run for their lives.  They are running as a direct result of our country, the United States of America invading Iraq. Saddam Hussein may have been a dictator and a bully, among other things, but he kept the peace.  Terrorists have replaced him.  Evil people who, who under the guise of an ‘ism’ are creating havoc. They are murdering indiscriminately and destroying the heritage of the Iraqi people.

Donald Trump, who is of German descent, was holding the door when the history of Nazism was taught. He missed that the path to the ovens of the Holocaust, started with registering the Jewish population.  His solution, a variation of the database in which he proposes including every Muslim living in America, was used in Germany and ended with 6,000,000 deaths during World War II of just one group of human beings.

Ben Carson, not to be outdone, I can’t even think of an ‘ism to describe the foulness of his comparing the Syrian refugees to ‘rabid dogs’.  This a man, an educated man, a man who is a neurosurgeon, a man that I have decided is suffering brain damage from inhaling ether all the years he was working in the operating room.  How else can we explain the absolute vile and obscene comments that he makes?

For others, the ‘ism is nativism, directed towards Muslims. We, Americans are guaranteed freedom of religion by our Constitution.  Apparently that only applies to Christians and I am beginning to realize that again it only applies to white American Christians. If it applied to all of Christians, 9 people would not have been murdered in a church, and that horror would not have been followed by a spate of arson, almost all Black churches.

A few days ago, there was a town hall meeting held in Virginia to discuss the building of a new mosque.  The hateful comments made at that meeting, (including one man who was so angry, his neck in the photo was literally red,) referred to the Americans at that meeting as terrorists. Why? Because in the eyes of some Americans if a person is a Muslim then it follows that person is also a terrorist.  I don’t remember anyone referring to Dylann Roof as a terrorist after he was arrested for the murder of 9 people attending Bible Study at Emanuel AME.

Where was Congress and Trump and all the others who are now calling for our borders to be closed, where were they in 2001?  Our government knew that the members of Al Qaeda were Saudi’s. Were there calls to create a database with the names of all Saudis living in here? In the past 14 years has there been a bill brought to the floor of the House and passed immediately, a bill that would subject Saudis wanting to come to America to be vetted the same way the Syrians are already being vetted? No, there has been no such bill.  The Saudis are exempt from the ‘isms.  Those In power and those who want to be in power have managed to forget that Osama Bin Laden, a man who killed over 3,000 Americans was a Saudi prince.

Those running for office, specifically at this time, the Presidency, and those who voted to close our borders to the refugees, those who have decided that these words no longer apply to America –

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” By Emma Lazarus.

Let us pray and if you do not pray, then hope, that one day Trump, Carson et al, do not stare at their TV screens, stare at the results of an ‘ism and wonder if they are looking at the response to their words.

WHERE DID THE COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVES GO?

If the current bunch of Republican Senators, Congressmen, Governors etc. were alive and running this country in 1860, slavery would be alive and well.

In 2001, Osama Bin Laden and his Saudi accomplices aka Al Qaeda attacked us.  We responded by invading Iraq. Saddam Hussein was deposed and later executed and that country was thrown into chaos.

Whatever the reason was,  that the Bush administration decided Saddam was responsible for 911, the result has been horrific and part of that result is the void, into which ISIS has stepped.

The entire region has been destabilized: from Iraq to Syria the innocent continue to be slaughtered, and the world continues to look to the US to fix what we broke.

Well, we cannot. It was broken long before 2003; it has been broken for 1000s of years. The fix has to come from the other Arab states and apparently they are not willing to make that commitment.

Syria is a nightmare, a nightmare that was reborn in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring. The result is millions of refugees streaming into Europe.

There are more than any of those countries can assimilate. The borders are overwhelmed with people entering.  The exception is France. Calais is also overwhelmed, but with the refugees trying to leave as they have discovered what Muslims who were born, bred or immigrated to France already knew, they are neither assimilated nor welcome.

And so we arrive at what is now happening as a result of the terrorists attacks on 11/13/15 in Paris, by very well armed and dedicated members of ISIS, (they have announced that they were responsible) who attacked several locations, not in the tourist areas, but in local neighborhoods and at a concert hall, killing over 100 and injuring 100s more. 

The world was shocked and still is as the news from Paris continues to appall us.  Into this painful time, stepped our band of blowhards--the GOP candidates for President telling us that we should not accept refugees coming from Syria. 1 Democratic and 30 Republican Governors joined the chorus, saying they would accept them into their states.  The fact that it takes 18-24 months of investigations before refugee status is given is of course immaterial to those making idiotic statements and creating conditions where there is news of mosques being attacked. 

Governor Christie, governor of New Jersey and a member of the Clown Car announced that we should not accept any, not even orphans under the age of 5. Who is going to care for them, he asked.  I could understand him asking since we have over 500,000 children in foster care and at least 50,000 homeless veterans, who are not being cared for. Unfortunately, like the rest of the merry band, he is not concerned about the well being of the refugees, children in foster care or our neglected vets, he is interested in scoring points with the members of the abomination aka the Republican Party.

He, the 30 other Governors and the 13 Clowns, Jindal finally threw in the towel, hope to use this crisis to score political points.  If they are not careful and continue to ramp up the hate rhetoric, they will also have blood on their hands. Contrary to their talking points, all the acts of terrorism committed in this country since 911 have been by Christians not Muslims.

NOT WELCOME

How America responds to terrorist attacks.

On Thursday November 12^th, 2015 there were 2 suicide bombings in Beirut. 43 people were killed, 240 were injured.  November 13^th, on the West Bank, 2 people died and 2 were injured. In Baghdad 19 people died and 33 were injured.

I did not receive a single breaking news email from CNN, the New York Times, etc. informing of these horrible incidents.

On Friday, the 13^th, at about 4:50PM, I received bulletin from CNN telling me and the world that at least 18 people were dead in multiple shootings in Paris. That was the first in a string of bulletins through 2PM on Sunday informing me “French police have issued an alert for the arrest of Belgian-born Abdeslam Salah in connection with the Paris attacks. "This individual is dangerous, do not interact with him," the alert says.

I have received an alert every time there is news, any news.

Facebook activated the “I am safe” app and offered a profile picture using the French flag.

Cable news went on 24-hour live coverage.  Anchors were called in and or put on planes to Paris.

In an email today from the NY Times, I found Lebanon mentioned once in article entitled “Paris Terror Attacks May Prompt More Aggressive U.S. Strategy on ISIS” the first paragraph reads “When the Islamic State stormed onto the scene in Syria and Iraq, it seemed focused on seizing territory in its own neighborhood. But in the last two weeks, the so-called soldiers of the caliphate appear to have demonstrated a chilling reach, with terrorist attacks against Russia, in Lebanon and now in France.”

What happened and is happening in Paris is horrific. What is also horrific is the lack of interest shown by the media and our leaders to the acts of horror that have become a way of life for people all over the world.

In addition we have those on the Far Right using this horror (this not these, since Beirut, Baghdad and the West Bank, do not count) to push their anti-immigration, gun rights, disrespect the President agendas. 

When I decided to write this column, I Googled “terrorist attacks” and one of the results was a Wiki entry. The number stunned me; in January 2015 there were 30 incidents. In November 2015, through the 13th including Beirut and Paris there have been 20 attacks.  Every month hundreds die, hundreds.

Paris, the City of Lights has been in the headlines, and will remain so for some time to come and then the public will grow weary of the 24 hour coverage, it will fade away and we will move on.

But around this world, human beings will continue to suffer from terrorist attacks.

Those who have been injured, lost loved ones, they will continue to live with the pain.

The terrorists will continue to wreak havoc, because we are not addressing the root of this evil. We here in America with our 1^st Amendment do not realize that every time one of our politicians, candidates or pundits makes a despicable comment either relating to religion or immigration they are helping those who want create terror in the world. 

When the neocons call for boots on the ground, another Iraq and ISIS is staring us in the face. More dead, more terror attacks, and no end in sight.

Terrorism can be brought to an end, but first we have to pay attention to the entire world, as long as Paris gets 24-hour coverage and Beirut is ignored, those of us who feel that our lives do not matter will continue to grow and the horror known as terror attacks will continue.